K.R. Gastreich's Blog, page 37

Winter Book Blast

Yes, it's that time of year again:  evenings of deep snow, hot chocolate, warm fireplaces, and great books!

To help you plan your winter escape, I'm participating in the Winter Book Blast Event, organized by author DelSheree Gladden.  From December 15th through 23rd, I'll be hosting a variety of authors representing different genres.  You'll get a chance to read a little about each book.  If your interest is piqued, click on the link below the summary to get your own copy in time for the holiday season.

Winter Book Blast Schedule:

Dec 15th:  Action/Adventure
Dec 16th:  Drama
Dec 17th:  Crime
Dec 18th:  Romance
Dec 19th:  Young Adult
Dec 20th:  Historical Fiction
Dec 21st:  Mystery/Detective
Dec 22nd: Fantasy
Dec 23rd:  YA Fantasy/Paranormal

Today's Featured Novels:


Book Blast Giveaways

As part of the Winter Book Blast, you will have the chance to win FREE books!  There will be one GRAND PRIZE featuring a book bundle for the holidays.  In addition, many individual authors will host raffles for their own books.  To enter the raffle for the grand prize, scroll down to the rafflecopter widget.  To win individual books, visit the blogs on the Linky List.

Giveaway Rules

US residents can enter giveaways for either paperbacks or ebooks.  International residents can enter ONLY for ebook giveaways.  International residents can enter the Grand Prize giveaway, but will receive only ebooks listed, or listed paperbacks will be exchanged for ebooks due to high shipping costs.

Good luck!

Enter the Giveaway for One Signed Copy of Eolyn (Hardcover Edition)

Enter the Grand Prize Giveaway for 18 Novels (Paperback and Electronic Copies)

Ruminations on reconciliation and the demise of the absolute...

I had a number of ideas percolating all week for this post: the trouble/joys of the do it yourself cosmology, the use of cataclysm as a plot device, the similarities and differences between political systems in genre fiction and the ‘real’ thing (hoo boy, now there’s a fantasy for you) and the evolution of a time honored staple in fantasy, good versus evil.
As much as I would like to ramble on about all of them, for I suspect they are all connected in some way, I think I’ll save thatmess for another day and stick to asking a few pertinent questions about good vs evil in the world of fantasy.

I have questions because, increasingly, I think we live and write in a world where absolutes have less and less ground on which to stand. I don’t think that is necessarily a bad thing, but there are times when I grow nostalgic for a cleaner equation. It seems these days that everything is a qualified success or failure. One man’s good guy is another man’s terrorist; one man’s god is another’s devil. Honestly, I sometimes wonder if globalization hasn’t brought out more polarization rather than unification even as it knits together the various world markets and political systems.
And yet I also think the effect of the above on the realm of fantasy has been positive. In a way, I think our current evolving socio-political environment has sparked some interesting hybridizations of some of the old time genre absolutes. Giving the good guys some flaws is in and rightly so, flaws are interesting, humanizing and approachable. Who wants a genre filled with Percivals and Aragorns only? Why do you think Arthur has never gone out of vogue?
I’ll take the flies in the ointment for two hundred, Alex. But even more intriguing to me is the notion of giving flaws to our anti-heroes, with flaws meaning human qualities. It used to be that bad guys were bad. Castle uglies were truly ugly, evil, twisted creatures with no redeeming qualities. True, we are told Morgoth and Sauron were fallen deities, but all we get in their stories are the unmitigated evil intentions. How much better would Morgoth’s character have been if Tolkien could have injected some of the stuff Miltongave Lucifer in Paradise Lost? (And if a gifted director and actor could pull that off, think how cool a film that might make! Del Toro, are you paying attention?) Yes, I think the intriguing bad guy has been around a long, long time. I think old uncle Milty was on to something the guys who put the Bible together missed out on, and up until the current era, most genre writers missed out on as well. I am thinking of the host of Tolkienesque clones that flooded bookshelves in the late 60’s and 70’s. Some of Brooks’ early Shanarra stuff comes to mind (and more recently, sadly, Paolini’s tripe).  Incarnations of Sauron abounded, and I have always considered them cardboard targets against which writers threw their heroes, pinning the absolute bad with victorious, absolute good. And this brings me to my point, such as it is. We have begun to see some great stories introducing us to the conflicted hero, the edgy good guy with flaws, some dark smolder and skeletons in the cliché closet.  Batman, anyone? That’s all good stuff but…
How about Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker? I refuse to give Hollywoodall the credit for giving us shades of interpretation.  Is there room in genre fiction for the conflicted bad guy? The evil that is not quite as absolute as tradition might have expected but that presents more intriguing possibilities? Mordred, Gollum, half of Peakes’ cast in the Gormenghast books…come on folks add to the list.  
Frankly, I think the rise of the flawed anti-hero reflects more precisely the world in which we live and write. And as troubling as that is for some (cue responses to our most recent election season), I believe the end result will be the continued evolution of the craft into something better and approachable to folks in the market place. But even more importantly, I think it will result in a great new list of wonderful, redefining characters.
I’ll take absolutes with a dash of irreverence for a thousand, Alex.
~Mark Nelson



 

Guest Author: Heather McDougal

Hadley Rille Books has some great titles coming out this month, and today we'd like to feature one of HRB's new novelists, Heather McDougal, author of Songs for a Machine Age.
 
Heather was born in Northern California and grew up in a rural summer crafts school, where people from all over the world came to make things. As a result she received in-depth training in pottery, weaving, cooking, construction, and how to grow things. She has a degree in fashion design and eventually achieved an MFA in sculpture, where she learned to blow glass and weld. She has a long-standing fascination with automata and clockwork, particularly those of the 18th century.
 
After many international travels, she now lives in the same countryside where she was raised, along with her two daughters and her husband, and works as an educator and a writer. She won a Writers of the Future award in 2009 and has had work published in anthologies and magazines since then. Songs for a Machine Age is her first published novel.
 
Heather has provided an excerpt from the novel, so please keep reading after her guest post.
 
Welcome, Heather!

~*~ The idea for Songs for a Machine Age evolved from a robotics course I took for teachers. They were running the robotics course in the traditional way, meaning a problem-solving situation: you create the parts of the robot based on an assigned task, and then tried to do the task. So, if the task was to move an object from one side of a maze to another, people came up with, for example, an arm that picked the object up, or a flat blade that pushed the object ahead of it like a bulldozer.

I went along for awhile, but in the end the thing that struck me was how prosaic, how mundane the challenges had been. And, when it came to building our own robots, everyone came up with machines that spoke of industry, of tasks. They all did something useful.

I, on the other hand, wanted to experiment. I built a little 4-wheeled vehicle that had large and small tires kitty-corner to each other, so that when it changed direction it would also shift its center of gravity, making it waggle from side to side. It was a silly, floppy, dancing machine.

The others were interested in this machine of mine, its patently un-useful being. "What does it do?" they asked me, and I said, "It dances." And they all commented on how unusual it was. They scratched their heads and smiled.

I couldn't get this experience out of my head. I went home and kept thinking about it. I began to think about how much the Industrial Revolution has shaped the way our society approaches machinery -- how, in fact, it was the needs of industry that created machines, and we don't -- we often can't -- think of machines except as framed in terms of their usefulness.

This view is actually changing these days. Burning Man, the Maker movement, indie music and even playlist technology have had a huge effect on why and how machines are created and used -- the making of fun machines has increasingly gone from industry to the home, to the individual. And more and more, they are being made for art, for fun, and for creativity. But what would have happened if, somewhere along the way in the very beginnings of the industrial revolution, the whole industrial paradigm was subverted into one of art and creativity? What if some culture had rejected the industrial model -- if the Sabots in France had been successful -- and that mechanical knowledge had been rerouted into some different direction? What kind of culture would we have then?

In its origins, Songs was my attempt to answer that question.
 
Songs for a Machine Age

There is a place where fabulous clockwork Devices fill Festival streets with color and sound.

Where the Gear Tourniers, in their places of high learning, keep alive the memory of the cruel horrors of an industrial past, now overthrown.

Where the skill of the hand and grace of the body are markers of true belief...

Elena alkeson has been on the run for six years.  Wanted by the fanatical Duke of Melifax for witchcraft, nowhere in Devien is safe, as her gift for sensing impending disaster comes with a price: she can't keep her mouth shut....Until she meets Fen, who shares a similar gift: the gift of seeing inside mechanisms and knowing what they do.  Elena and Fen must flee for their lives, going to the capital City of Helseve to seek asylum, and, perhaps, a life in which their gifts can be used for good.  Amidst the machinery and the brilliance of the Autumn Festival, Fen and Elena find friencship, danger, and some powerful allise.But Melifax and his sect, the dour Browns, are determined to bring the people of Devien into a new age, an age of moralism, conformity and mass production, ensuring that the beauty and pageantry of Devien and its Devices will be lost forever. Excerpt from Songs for a Machine Age   Elena sat on a rock around which the vines flowed, looking out at the curving slopes, staring at the distant winking light that represented her enemy. The knowledge that they might be so close caught her in an old terror, making her shiver in the darkness; and yet, the light of their fire kept them distant. As long as the light remained, she felt she knew where they were. Come midnight, she was still staring out at the blankness of the night and listening to the myriad scratchings and squeakings of the night creatures. The hours wore dully, and she blinked away sleep, aching with tiredness. The distant fire had long since dwindled to a dull mutter of light, and she had to pee. Rising and stretching her stiff limbs, she moved off among the vines to squat before she went back to wake Fen. She had barely put her thumbs into the waistband of her leggings when she heard a sound: a faint, rhythmic susurration coming from downhill, somewhere among the many vines. Not the sound of horses or men walking, but rather, a smooth, mechanical sound, like a Device on Festival day. Curious, Elena squinted into the darkness, trying to see what could be approaching in the thin moonlight. The thing passed ahead of her, a few rows along, only visible by a few silvery glints. Elena shifted, peering. It stopped. She held her breath. Then, above the shoulders of the vines, she saw something dark silhouetted against the starlit sky: something curved and many-pointed. Antlers. Antlers made of brass. She had seen those antlers before, had thought of them often over the years. They dropped down again, and the mechanical sound returned, shifted to a longer interval, and was gone. Elena stood in the dark for a long time, listening, but the thing did not come back. Percival? Here? Why would Zander Alloway’s stag be here, passing where she sat? Was it a sign from the Gods, from Ula of the Grove, or perhaps Pomath, God of Hands and Making? What could it mean? Memories rushed in, of days long ago, of another night like this one, another sighting of the stag. She remembered the center of the meadow: the shape of a stag, alert and cautious, shining eerily in the moonlight. She had tiptoed closer, her pain forgotten as she watched his many-pointed antlers swing first this way, then that; the pale light ran across his shoulders with a watery gleam, as if he were made of ice, standing in that great lake of moonlight. He had leapt off, bounding through the shadows with a movement like liquid silver, and she heard something odd: the sound of machinery, quiet and regular, a metallic slithering. The stag itself was a Device, a Created thing. The beauty and precision of it amazed her. In the small cottage later, after her collapse, the tall, knotted-looking man with red hair and stern eyes whose hands had nevertheless been very gentle with her wounds, had drawn up a chair and gazed at her with his queer, unsmiling face pulled down in thought. “What’s your name, and where did you get those wounds?” he wondered aloud. She was sipping broth and, as too tired and grateful for caution, her mouth gave her away. “My name is Elena Alkeson, and I—” Elena’s mouth snapped shut. His grim countenance cracked into a grin. “Cautious, eh? Not surprised, with those welts on your back.” His grin disappeared as he observed her curiously. “Seems as if you came across Percival last night, doing his nightly rounds. Gave me quite a start, it did, when he came back.” She had to stop herself leaning forward. “Oh, was that your stag? He’s wonderful! Did you Create him?” It was his turn to snap his mouth shut. She felt a perverse urge to laugh, but it quickly turned into a wince, and he leapt up to help her get comfortable before excusing himself while he fetched the water. She had lain in bed, watching the sun move across the beautiful quilt and wondered who this man was. The broth tasted delicious, the bread crusty and fresh. On sleepy impulse, she reached up to a shelf just alongside her bed and carefully took down one of the little wooden boxes that were stacked there, higgledy piggledy. It was about the size of her palm and made of some pale wood, with reddish corners where the sides had been carefully box-combed together. The number two had been carved delicately on the lid that opened beautifully on tiny hinges. Inside, on the clean wooden surface, rested two dozen or more tiny machine-parts, gears or cogs of some sort, glistening as they rolled unevenly around on their pegs. She reached in with a finger and pushed them around: they were hard, sharply-cut little things, that stuck to her finger like the tiny beads her mother used to sew onto collar-edges… The sense of warmth and security that came with this memory nearly undid her. As she squatted, she felt tears begin to drip down her cheeks and off her nose, to water the grapes along with the water from her body. Lifting her leggings, she wiped her eyes and, after a few more minutes of staring into the dark, went back to Fen, who lay rigid under his blanket. “Fen,” she whispered, “Wake up.” He sat up immediately, letting out a long breath. His face was shadowed in the wan light, but his shoulders sagged with relief. “There you are! I’ve been awake for a half-hour or more, wondering where you’d gone.” “Fen, listen, I just saw something. Something wonderful! It may have been an accident, but I think it was a sign we are going in the right direction.” “What are you talking about?” “The stag, Zander Alloway’s stag! I saw it, out among the vines.” “Zander Alloway’s…what?” “When I was escaping the Duke, it was Zander Alloway who helped me. Yes, theZander Alloway. He had a Device, a beautiful stag, who appeared in a field and led me to his house. I wouldn’t have found him otherwise.” “And you just saw this Device again?” Fen shook his head. “Are you certain you didn’t fall asleep and dream about it?” “No! I had just got down from where I was sitting to relieve myself, so I wasn’t even sitting. It was Percival, I’m certain of it. I’d know that sound anywhere.” Fen shook his head again, as if to clear it. “But that’s just so…” “Strange, I know. Fen, it’s not the first time I’ve seen him, in the distance, at night or early in the morning. I don’t know, maybe he’s checking up on me.” “A Device, checking up on you?” Elena stared off into the darkness. “Never mind.” She sighed. “I suppose it’s hard to believe if you’ve not seen it for yourself. Listen, their fire’s gotten bigger again, down there. Can you take the watch, please? I think I need some sleep.” Fen nodded and went off into the vines a ways, disappearing from view. Elena lay down gratefully, taking refuge in her blanket as she settled into the grass at the end of a row of vines, the dry leaves tickling her face. Percival! Here! She smiled in the darkness. Hail Pomath, hail Ula. The Gods are watching.  

Special Guest Author: Tessa Gratton

This week we welcome Tessa Gratton, author of Blood Magic and Blood Keeper.  Tessa has wanted to be a paleontologist or a wizard since she was seven.  She was too impatient to hunt dinosaurs, but is still searching fro someone to teach her magic.  After traveling the world with her military family, she acquired a BA (and the important parts of an MA) in gender studies, and then settled down in Kansas with her partner, her cats, and her mutant dog.  You can visit Tessa at TessaGratton.com

 ***
From about age 8, my goal in life was to be a great wizard. The sort who’s discovered randomly in the fields one day and taken to a dark tower where she’s alone with her teacher for at least a decade, learning about mathematics and alchemy in order to control the natural world with a complicated ritual. Possibly also I’d have a griffon familiar.

Because it’s the little things.
By the time I was in high school I realized that a) a wizard master would be nearly impossible to find, and b) probably it was for the best, because I was likely to turn out a very DARK wizard. The world is better off for my not having phenomenal cosmic powers. The next best thing was to be a writer.
I wrote loads of stories about wizards and magic and fantastical worlds, but by the time I started Blood Magic, which would become my first published novel, I was thinking about magic very differently. It was a more intimate thing, tied to prayer and desire, not grandiose plots and world domination. I read everything I could get my hands on about “real” magic around the world. Religious rituals, witchcraft from all ages and countries, folklore and fairy tales – in all of these places, magic was about the heart, about balance and sacrifice and nature. Heroic magic hinged on simple choices instead of geometry.
And it was darker than anything I’d imagined. Animal sacrifice, blood magic, resurrection, cursework; all of these things exist in our world, in our major religions. I became desperate to explore them in a modern setting.
I started the story with character, of course, with family and relationships and loss, but when I began to build the magic my main questions were:
How far do you have to go for this magic?

How far can you go and still be a hero?

How bad can I make it?

Where is the line between my hero and my villain and the magic they each use?

There are three voices in Blood Magic: a girl, a boy, and the villain. I follow the villain’s descent into darkness in order to highlight the choices she makes that drag her down, to parallel her with the modern girl who struggles with the same dark impulses, but chooses more selflessly.
What makes dark fantasy thrilling and scary is that it’s not about world domination or creatures, it’s that the monsters are us. They’re reflections of who we are, or who we could be. Darkness in stories lets us explore ourselves, lets us look the monster in the face and relate to it.
My 8 year old self would have assumed that Blood Magic would be about great alchemy and warring wizard kingdoms, but instead it’s just about a girl trying to figure out who to become. Her magic is dark dark dark, but intimate and immediate and personal. It reflects her heart.
It reflects myheart.

Special Guest Author: Melissa Mickelsen

This week we welcome our sister at Hadley Rille Books, author Melissa Mickelsen. 

Melissa is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Nightingale. Born and raised in Georgia, Melissa currently lives in Germany with her Air Force husband and two cats. Melissa loves hiking in the mountains, eating strawberries, reading, reading, more reading, and really good barbecue.

She began writing in high school. After graduating from the University of Georgia in 2007 with a degree in Art History, Melissa worked in various jobs before pursuing a master’s degree in technical communication and information design from Southern Polytechnic State University.

Melissa's been kind enough to provide us with an excerpt from Nightingale, so after her interview, please keep reading!

Tell us a little about the novel Nightingale.

Nightingale is the story of a halfblood girl. Halfbloods are rare creatures, half-human and half-anthela, and ultimately regarded as demons by both races. They don’t fit in anywhere. When she is young, her home and everything she ever held dear is destroyed, and the man responsible forces her to become an assassin against her will. He uses her strangeness and the fear her kind inspires to terrorize a kingdom. She struggles for her freedom, pursued at every turn by the king’s General Talros who has vowed to capture her.

The book is about one girl’s fight to find herself, to live as she wants, but first she has to survive.

What was the inspiration for the character that goes by the name Nightingale?

Honestly, my teenage years. I went through some rough times growing up. At the core of it, we all want to be accepted as we are. We all struggle through tough situations in life, situations we think will break us, but there is always an ending. Things get better. Sometimes, though, we are the catalyst. Sometimes we have to force our circumstances to change.

The world of Nightingale is complex and very richly imagined.  How long did it take you to work out all the details?

Well, I first wrote Nightingale while I was in high school. The first draft, which was extremely rough, was written in about 4 months. I reworked it from the ground up a few years later and the whole process took about a year and a half to complete. I took many notes during that time, sketching out regions and races, and reading a lot of books about medieval living, weapons, herbs, terrain, etc.

What other projects are you working on right now?  Will there be a sequel to Nightingale?

I do have sequels planned for Nightingale. In fact, there are three other books planned in the series. I am currently working on writing and self-editing the third one.

What is your writing process like?  Any interesting rituals or techniques?

I write best in the early morning or late at night. I usually listen to music; the Lord of the Rings and Morrowind soundtracks are my favorite right now. I also don’t like having the overhead light on. A lamp in the corner is fine. A softer light makes it easier for me to concentrate.

What are you reading right now? Who is your favorite author?

I’m reading The Burning Land by Bernard Cornwell and Meat by Joseph D’Lacey. I have a lot of favorite authors: Jean M. Auel, Juliet Marillier, James Clavell, and Dan Simmons are a few. I mostly read fantasy and historical fiction, and sometimes dabble in science fiction.

What advice would you give to aspiring authors?

Read everything you can get your hands on. Even something that might not sound interesting can contain a scene or sentence or thought that can spark an idea. The next piece of advice would be to develop your own style. Don’t try and copy anyone else; just be yourself. Work on developing your own voice. Just write naturally and don’t try to force it.

 ~*~
Excerpt from Nightingale

      I sprinted through the lanes made into labyrinths by the ramshackle houses, searching for refuge. This was Astin Talros after me, the revered General of the vaunted Weapons. I had to find a place to hide, and fast. I could no longer hear him behind me, but did not spare a glance to make certain. It would slow me down.
      I chose a ledge and jumped, scrambled upwards onto a roof and raced down the length of the lane until a missing roof halted my progress. I spun, looked swiftly, and leapt to the nearest structure on the opposite side of the street, thanking the gods for narrow passages.
      I dashed over rafters and loose roofs with heaving lungs and galloping heart until a section of rotted shingles cracked under me. I was thrown off-balance, skidded to my knees and slipped close to the edge of the pitched covering. In an instant I was up and off again, but the slip had slowed me considerably. Exposed beams like skeletal fingers stretched before me and I ran toward them.
      The pain was immediate and incredible. I gasped as my shoulder erupted in agony, as I was lifted off my feet and sent spinning through the open air to land in a stunned tangle on the refuse-littered ground. I fought for breath, for sense, and came to myself just enough to notice the pale-fletched arrow protruding from the front of my right shoulder, just under the collarbone.
      My trembling fingers touched it and the pain blossomed in my skull. I cried out as the redness washed over me, trying to drag me into the depths of unconsciousness.
      His horrid face loomed over me, wavering in my pain-watered gaze. “Where is Guildmaster Caspon?” he rasped, grabbing me by the front of my tunic and lifting my torso off the ground. “I know he’s your master, so tell me where he’s hiding!”
      I struggled to draw breath, to see straight. I could feel the wooden shaft against my bones, scraping against the muscles I worked to keep still. Each pulse of my heart was fire and ice, like sharp gravel in my veins. “I am…” I said as strongly as I could. The front of my tunic was wet with blood, sticky on my skin. “I am no one’s slave.” The words were more powerful than I thought they would be. I met Talros’ eyes with as much dignity as I could muster.
      And then I could not focus on words for my world was spinning. I screamed as the arrow shaft was snapped and my hands rebound. “You are a coward and a fool,” Talros said in a flat tone, shoving my headband into my mouth to stifle the noises I must be making, and heaved me over a shoulder so that my hair hung loose around my face. I could feel trickles of my own blood creep down my neck toward my face, leaving hot trails of wet in their wake.
      His arm went around my waist, holding me like a porter does a sack of flour. Each step was torture, each breath torment. Of all the arrows I had loosed, of all those aimed in my direction, not one had ever struck me. Was this what my victims had felt, this searing pain? My self-loathing redoubled. I had caused this suffering to others; it was only fair that my turn had come.
      I thought suddenly of my companion. Had he made it to the manor? Get away, I thought. Run from here and forget the maps. Talros was more cunning that I had thought, to my detriment, but if I could keep him from Nyx then I would try my hardest, wounded or not. I exhaled and let my body go limp in the hopes that Talros would put me down, thinking I was unconscious or perhaps dead.
      He did not fall for my ruse, and I made myself turn my head, heavy though it seemed, to gain my bearings now that we were gone from the mummers’ area. The rotting shacks had vanished and the lanes were stone and soil both, giving way to cobblestone as we went onward. An upward-sloping area came up beside the lane, and I recognized it as my practice field.
      The manor! Oh gods, oh gods! I thought wildly. He is going to the manor. Why? Nyx might still be in there, fool boy who had insisted on the job, and we two could not be remotely safe in the same place. I had to delay if I could to give Nyx a greater chance at escape. I was not certain how much time had passed, but it could not have been enough. Daylight could come and I would still think it had not been enough.
      I twisted my body, fighting the flaring pain, and kicked outward, struggling to slip from his grasp. He grunted in surprise and hurt as the toe of my hard boot punched him in the ribs, and his arm tightened on my waist. The other wrapped around my knees in an iron grip, stopping my flailing feet almost as soon as they had started.
      “Stop!” he snarled, pulling his arms tight, but I writhed like a snake and managed to contort enough to snap my teeth on the flesh right below his ear. He bellowed and heaved me from his shoulder. I landed on my side on the stone street, the wind knocked from my lungs. The hurt was incredible but I had no air to cry out. I could see my blood in the starlight, dark and gleaming like water under a full moon. I rolled my eyes to the man, seeing a black slick on the side of his neck, and bared my teeth at him.

The Other Side of the Screen Door

Halloween is just a couple of weeks away; how better to celebrate the season than with a ghost story? I wrote this a couple of years ago, to help celebrate Halloweeniness on a friend's blog. It remains one of my personal favorites.
Happy Halloweeeeeen! I sit on the porch swing every evening, watching the stars step out of dusk, glittering debutantes swirling onto a dance floor. It’s my favorite time of the day. My peaceful time. The stars don’t seem as bright as they were when I was a child; but I remember. I pretend. It’s nearly as good as it used to be, for a little while. It’s cold, though. I never minded the cold before. It used to be a relief from the southern heat. Now I miss its velvet clinging to my skin, making my hair curl. I miss the fireflies and cricketsong and the scent of peaches long after season’s end. It was always summer. Once. Things change. They become too small to see, to hear. I swing. Back and forth. Back and forth. The chains of the porch swing creak and groan. How many times I’ve asked him to oil them. He doesn’t hear me, or pretends not to. If he would listen, just once, things would be better. I’d stop being so angry all the time. I don’t like to be harsh with him. I love him. And it’s so very unladylike, throwing things, breaking things, making a mess that he has to tidy. Fool that I am; I keep hoping he’ll see things the way I do. Love is not supposed to be this way. I hear him inside, cleaning up the dishes I dashed to the floor, pretending he can’t hear the porch swing, believing he can drown me out. He should know better by now. I can hold out longer than he can. I swing faster. The creaking becomes a rusty, grating, angry sound. I want to be a girl again, full of dreams that will never come true. I want to go inside, make him acknowledge me, make him love me. I want. I want. But I never get what I want. Why should this be any different? The screen door opens and clacks closed again. I let the swing sway to a stop. He is standing so near. I can imagine his warmth. I can imagine his touch. I long for both. He breathes deeply, and lets it go like a sigh. “You have to go, Liddy,” he says. “Please. Leave me in peace.” He calls me Liddy. My name is Charlotte. If he would only look upstairs in that closet I bang closed all the time, he’d see my name written on the wall there. I can’t, I tell him. I won’t. I love you. But he doesn’t hear me. He never hears me. The swing sways, creaks. Softly. He weeps. Inside, a crash. A mirror, I think. Maybe it was more than one. I don’t want to do this. He leaves me no choice, and I’m sorry for it, but a girl must do what a girl must do.

Sex, Sensuality, Eroticism, where do you draw the line?

I will never forget the words of my first reviewer-critic, my grandmother, a committed reader, matriarch and saint after she read some of my early efforts, “This is a good story, Mark, but you need to put a little sex in it.”   

Hearing those words spoken in grandma-voice, wow, deep emotional scars.  And yet over the years I have come to realize she was right.  That story was good. Some bits and pieces have survived to this day as nuances in The Poets of Pevana and subsequent projects. My grandmother was a pretty savvy gal. She liked her romances on the sensual side. She was a painter, loved sweets (her Divinity recipe is a family heirloom), and understood that no matter how fanciful the tale, certain fundamental qualities should always prevail. Sex is always there. You cannot write people stories, or for that matter, being stories without coming to grips with the concept.
I think this is true in all fiction, especially fantasy, and as writers we all need to make decisions about how we present that stuff. How much is too much? How much allegiance do we owe our intended audience? How much do we allow our characters to set that tone?
I raised myself on the epic good verses evil tomes. I am still a sucker for the form, but I learned early on that once you get beyond the descriptions of the hero’s armor, the fifth heroic comment and save the world from the ubiquitous Dr. Evil type bad guy plot, more often than not what you have is a flat tale full of cardboard cut outs. There’s flesh and then there’s flesh, as it were. 
Tolkien’s sensuality comes through in his wonderful language, but the tale is largely devoid of physical sex. Perhaps that is why Boredof the Rings , The Harvard Lampoon’s marvelous parody was so successful.  Practically every page drips with titillation; it is a bathroom joke response. The underlying comment is a criticism of the form: LOTR is great but it risks turning off its audience because, despite the plethora of pair bonds, infatuations and attractions there is absolutely no sack time! I wonder if Sam thought Rosie had a great ass.  Did Gimli have erotic dreams of Galadriel’s ears or timeless cleavage on the boat journey south? How does one have elf-sex in a tree? I just don’t see how a talan would serve if things got immortal-energetic, know what I mean? Did Aragorn manage to talk Arwen into a few mortal-fumbling pleasures in the garden at Rivendell?
I’m not trying to ridicule my favorite book and author, far from it. I admire the late professor for crafting such a wonderful body of work without having to resort to the sorts of things my grandmother seemed to feel essential.  I don’t think we will ever again have a work with similar restraint be as successful. Martin has shown us the marketing value of ripping fantasy sex, and I doubt the genre will ever be the same. And yet I think there is room here for discussion beyond Martin’s heavy handed use of nudity, body parts and intimacy.  I believe we have to let our characters tell their stories.   
In Poets, I started out with the idea of letting things go, playing around with titillation, dalliance and adultery within a framework of a political/religious story.  I recall having to fight for a character’s sensual aspect with my wonderful editor (perhaps the only battle I won in that process J). And yet as I drafted the earliest versions of the novel I quickly came to realize that the characters kept asking me for more realism. One of my least favorite characters early on has become one three drafted novels on: Demona Anargi, the over-sexed wife of Sevire Anargi in Poets. Her only use for me initially was to serve as post-adolescent angst totem for Talyior, one of the poet-main characters. A funny thing happened on the way to the conclusion. I learned Demona’s only weapon in the world she lived in was the sensuality and assets that threatened to turn her into a cliché. I actually found myself toning down some of her scenes because, in the light of her growing reality for me, the way I was using her seemed tilted towards cheap eroticism rather than an expression of her human power and weakness.  And I mean just that. Demona now represents for me one of the most real characters I have ever created. She’s a contradiction—just like the rest of us.  
And that is where I think my original question becomes more pertinent: Where do we draw the line between artifice and actual? And in using the motif, how much do we show? For me, the sensuality in my novels has served as a way into the real lives of the characters on the page. I’m a sucker for love. I think there is a place for it in our genre that allows for truth while avoiding rank eroticism. It’s handling that responsibility that makes the characters and the world they live in come alive for us and, hopefully, our readers.
I also think Sam liked Rosie’s curves, Celeborn had a thing for Galadriel’s rack, and Arwen and Aragorn had a great time making up for sixty years of abstinence. Just sayin’.
 

The Eternal Return of the Vampire

October is with us again!  And along with it fall colors, chilly nights, warm sweaters, and -- best of all -- scary stories. 

This Halloween season on Heroines of Fantasy, we will dedicate our discussion to dark fantasy and horror.  We will also have two special guests at the end of the month, Melissa Mickelsen and Tessa Gratton, who write dark fantasy and will share with us some of the secrets of their fantasy worlds. 

An iconic scene from the horror film Nosferatu.My post this week was inspired by the story of Abigail Gibbs, a young author recently awarded a six-figure contract for her vampire novel The Dark Heroine, inspired by the Twilight saga.  I found out about Abigail through Facebook, where her achievement was met with much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Twilight, again?!  When will they learn a dead horse is a dead horse?  

Of course, mixed in with the pleas for no more Twilight was a not-so-subtle thread of professional jealousy over that 6-figure contract. 

I don't begrudge Abigail Gibbs her success. 

Edward Cullen, the epitomy of the
"romantic" vampire.What little I know about her indicates she is a gifted young woman with verve and dedication.  She is poised to start her English degree at Oxford University; she spent her high school years writing novels. She promises The Dark Heroine will be grittier than Twilight, bloodier and infused with more horror elements, which I can't help but think will be an improvement, a refreshing return to the classic vampire myth.  I am even hoping that she will cast a glance our way, and grace Heroines of Fantasy with a guest post at some point, though I will have to do some homework on how to make this happen, now that she's uber-famous without even having published. 

But beyond Abigail Gibbs, and Twilight, and all the spinoffs they might inspire, lies a deeper question for me, and it is this: 

What, exactly, is the eternal appeal of the vampire myth?  Why is it continually resurrected, virtually unchanged, in story after story?

Akasha, one of the few vampiresses that
made it to the big screen, came complete
with bikini armor.I'll admit up front that I am not the person to answer this question.  I used to be an avid follower of vampires, back in high school, when Anne Rice rose to the top of the genre with her bestseller Interview with the Vampire and its companion novels.  But somewhere between high school and college, vampires lost their appeal. They ceased, quite honestly, to have anything new to offer.

Even the Twilight craze didn't succeed in pulling me back into the vampire myth.  We rented the movie once it was out on DVD, but I wasn't all that impressed, and I certainly didn't experience the thrill that vampires gave me back when I was an adolescent. 

Indeed, the further I've drifted from the vampire literature, the more inclined I've been to see its symbolisms and tropes in a rather critical light. 

She's too young for you, dude!For example, is it just me, or is there something rather decrepit when a 500 year-old-man courts an eighteen-year-old girl?  If you do the math, in vampire time that young lady is about 3 years old. Now, to be fair to those old bachelor vampires, I understand it gets harder as the centuries pass.  All the good vampiresses marry other dark lords, or they have stakes driven through their hearts, or they suffer terrible accidents on sunny beaches. 

But couldn't you maybe try to court someone at least a little more mature? Like, say, around fifty -- which, in vampire years, would still be an innocent-and-ripe-for-the-picking ten.  And fifty-some ladies are looking better all the time in this day and age.  Take Madonna, for example. I'm sure she'd be up for immortality, and she wouldn't blink an eye at having to drink blood every night for the rest of eternity. 

Courtship is a central theme of the vampire myth, and it's almost always a vampire man courting a mortal woman.  Anne Rice, for a brief moment, brought us Akasha and Mekare in Queen of the Damned.  But all the iconic vampires -- Dracula, Nosferatu, Barnabas, Kurt Barlow, Lestat, Edward -- are men.

Kurt Barlow's look was almost certainly
inspired by Nosferatu.Why is it up to the men to initiate women into the dark arts?  I would love to see a 500-year-old woman court an eighteen year old boy, just for a change of pace.  What would that relationship look like? How would the public react to it? Would the story look at all the same, if we were to reverse the traditional roles of the vampire myth?  Maybe a new perspective like this will be one of the treats in store for us when Abigail Gibbs unveils her new take on the old story.

Now, don't get me wrong.  I haven't abandoned my love of vampires entirely.  I just tend to look askance at the romantic vampires.  Perhaps my standards have risen too much since high school, but I simply don't find the blood sucking dead guy all that appealing as a date.

Vampires are, however, very appealing as creatures of horror, capable of reflecting the most terrorific aspects of our own nightmares, driven to madness by hunger and the incomprehensible burdens of their great age and isolation.   

My favorite vampire of all time?  Nosferatu.  Now there was a monster you did not want to meet in a dark alley, much less go out to dinner with.  All the others pale (or shall I say, sparkle?) by comparison. 

So this month, I ask Abigail Gibbs and all the aspiring vampire authors out there:

Give us the scary vampires, the Nosfaratus and the Kurt Barlows, and while you're at it, give us some kick-ass scary female vampires too.  Make it bloodier.  Make it grittier. 

Make us jump like the mere mortals we are when the vampire says, "Boo!"

Not a pretty boy, but that's what horror is all about.

Posted by Karin Rita Gastreich

Special Guest Author: Pamela Sargent

This week it is our great pleasure to welcome award winning author Pamela Sargent as a guest on Heroines of Fantasy.

Pamela Sargent has won the Nebula and Locus Awards and is the author of the novels Cloned Lives, The Sudden Star, Watchstar, The Golden Space, The Alien Upstairs, Eye of the Comet, Homesmind, Alien Child, The Shore of Women, Venus of Dreams, Venus of Shadows, Child of Venus, and Climb the Wind. Ruler of the Sky, her 1993 historical novel about Genghis Khan, was a bestseller in Germany and in Spain, where she was invited to speak at the Institute of American Studies, the University of Barcelona, and the Complutense University of Madrid. She also edited the Women of Wonder anthologies, the first collections of science fiction by women, published in the 1970s by Vintage/Random House and in updated editions during the 1990s by Harcourt Brace. A short story, “The Shrine,” was produced for the syndicated TV anthology series Tales from the Darkside.

Tor Books reissued her 1983 young adult novel Earthseed, selected as a Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association, and a sequel, Farseed, in early 2007.  Farseed was chosen by the New York Public Library for their 2008 Books for the Teen Age list of best books for young adults. A third novel, Seedship, was published in 2010. Earthseed has been optioned by Paramount Pictures, with Melissa Rosenberg, scriptwriter for all five “Twilight” films, set to write and produce through her Tall Girls Productions. In 2012, Sargent was honored with the Pilgrim Award, given for lifetime contributions to science fiction and fantasy scholarship, by the Science Fiction Research Association.

Heroines of Fantasy: Thank you, Pamela, for joining us today!  What sparked your early interest in science fiction?
 Pamela Sargent: As a child, I wasn’t what you would call a sophisticated reader – what child is? – and pretty much read anything I could get my hands on. The first science fiction novel I recall reading was Man of Many Minds by E. Everett Evans, which I got by mistake with some other paperbacks. This was when I was about eleven, and this novel was a revelation. People going to other planets, aliens, mental telepathy – I had this vague notion that Evans had come up with these ideas all by himself. Eventually I discovered that there was a whole body of work devoted to these kinds of ideas, but I still remember how strikingly original Man of Many Minds seemed to me at the time. I was also a fan of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone on TV. What I appreciated most about the TZ episodes was the way they used science fiction and fantasy elements to offer a different perspective on our own world and its dilemmas – and maybe it was a more honest perspective, one that could reveal many of the hidden, unspoken assumptions we usually take for granted.

But the book that really turned me into a science fiction reader was Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, partly because of its sheer bravado brilliance and partly because of the circumstances under which I discovered it. I was messed up during my teens, have spent much of my life wrestling with manic-depression since then, or bipolar disorder as they call it these days, and spent some months in my early teens in one of those facilities sometimes referred to as a “nuthouse” or a “hat factory” with other troubled young people. During the first couple of days I was there, frightened and disoriented, I found an old beat-up paperback of The Stars My Destination, read it, and clung to it like a lifeline or a talisman. I imagined myself, like the novel’s antihero Gully Foyle, “jaunting” out of that place; I’d try to conjure up a future self who would be looking back at that time, who would finally have escaped. I suppose I identified with Gully Foyle. As I said, I wasn’t a very sophisticated reader.  I went on to discover the works of Arthur C. Clarke and H.G. Wells at the local library. By then I was looking for some rationality and intellectual thought in my fiction, another escape from my troubled emotions. The private girls’ school I attended, which fortunately took a chance on admitting me and also gave me a scholarship, required every student to research and write a junior and senior paper on a subject to be approved by our English teacher. She allowed me to write my junior paper on the science fiction of H. G. Wells – and even gave me an A.  HoF: Have the reasons you write science fiction changed over the years?  If so, how? PS: That’s a good question, and it has me thinking about what actually got me writing science fiction in the first place. The first stories I wrote before attempting sf were slice-of-life stories, imitations of writers I admired, or ludicrous attempts at historical fiction – I say ludicrous because from what I remember, I committed every offense possible, including stuffing the stories with anachronisms and sentimentality and passages of purple prose. Most of my early stuff was really bad, but occasionally I would produce something that, at least to my English teachers, showed promise. That usually happened whenever a story took hold of me and demanded that I write it; that’s how it would feel to me anyway.
Writers are always being told to write what they know. For me, science fiction offered a way of doing that while also giving me some distance from the material. Having to work only with what I knew struck me as a recipe for writing something claustrophobic and self-indulgent. As it turns out, you almost can’t help writing out of what you’ve known and experienced anyway, but what anyone knows goes beyond – or should go beyond – personal experience. It also helped that some of my favorite reading as a kid was historical fiction, which has much in common with science fiction. Both the historical novelist and the science fiction writer have to write about societies unlike their own; both require a fair amount of research. They also have to write convincingly about times and places completely removed from the experience of their readers.
 It was my good luck that I also began writing at just the time more women were gaining notice as science fiction writers. They’d found the perfect literary form for posing questions about assumptions often taken for granted, to explore how things might be different. Editing the Women of Wonder anthologies was as educational and inspiring an experience for me as it was for anyone reading those anthologies.  And now we’re living in Philip K. Dick’s world, as I often say. Or as Eleanor Arnason put it in a speech she gave at a Wiscon some years back: “We are living in an age of revolution and in a science fiction disaster novel. No, we are living in several science fiction disaster novels at once. The stakes are huge. Human civilization may be at risk. The solutions are going to require science and technology, as well as political and social struggle.” I don’t know how anyone can write convincingly about the present without bringing a science-fictional perspective to the work.  HoF: Tell us a little about Earthseed and its companion novels, Farseed and Seed Seeker.  PS: To begin, I’ll give you my usual answer, which is that Earthseed was inspired by Brian Aldiss’s Starship, Robert A. Heinlein’s Universe, and Muriel Spark’s The Primer of Miss Jean Brodie. Of course that doesn’t tell you a whole lot if you haven’t read Earthseed, or tell you anything at all about Farseed and Seed Seeker.
I began Earthseed with the intention of writing a novel about a long-term space voyage, with the characters living inside an interstellar vessel that is the only home they have ever known. In Earthseed, that vessel – Ship – is a hollowed-out asteroid controlled by an artificial intelligence with the mission of seeding habitable planets, and the main characters are all kids in their middle teens. I’m not giving anything away if I mention that Ship is as important a character as any of the human beings in the story and that this AI is in its own way also an adolescent. Ship is also the only parent or mentor that Zoheret, the central character, and her companions have had, as they’ve all been gestated from stored genetic material and born and raised inside Ship. Eventually Ship has to allow these kids to establish their own community apart from its guidance, because they have to be prepared for when they reach a habitable planet, settle it, and must survive on their own without Ship’s help. Some have compared Earthseed to Lord of the Flies, although I wasn’t thinking of William Golding’s novel when I wrote it. Farseed is about the conflicts among the children of the characters in Earthseed after they’ve settled their new home and Seed Seeker is set about a century after events in Farseed, with the people of two very different cultures hoping for and yet fearing that Ship might return. Among the problems all these people face are adapting to an environment that, however Earthlike, is altering them biologically, how much to depend on a technology they lack the knowledge to develop further, and resolving the distrust and hostility that has grown between those who cling to their identity as “true humanity” and those who have become more a part of their settled world.
 Writing Farseed and Seed Seeker presented the challenge of showing what some of the characters in Earthseed become as adults. I remember what it was like in my teens, when I would swear to myself that I would never turn into the kind of conventional, boring person others expected me to be, that I would never give up my youthful ambitions, however fanciful, that I wouldn’t just sink into middle age and turn into just the kind of horse’s ass I’d always hated as a child. You might recall that line at the end of the first Back to the Future movie, where Michael J. Fox’s character asks Doc Brown, who has just returned from the future in his souped-up DeLorean, what happens to him and his girlfriend: “Do we become assholes or something?” Most of us end up making compromises later or abandon our youthful idealism, but I wanted my characters, in their very different and sometimes tragic or even destructive ways, to be consistent with their earlier selves. That’s of course a concern with any novel or series that presents its characters over a long period of time, but I might have been a bit more conscious of it while writing Earthseed since it was to be published as a young adult novel.  HoF: You have published prolifically over the years, including several anthologies featuring the contributions of women to science fiction.  In what ways do you think women authors have changed science fiction? 

PS: The easiest way for me to answer that question is to say: Go get my Women of Wonder anthologies, either the three published by Vintage in the 1970s or the rebooted two-volume set Harcourt Brace brought out in the 1990s, where I deal with that question at length. But I’ll come at this question from another angle. 
Greg Benford has often said that genres are also like immense discussions that develop and trade and ring variations on ideas. He claims that science fiction is more like a jazz band doing riffs as opposed to so-called serious fiction, which he compared to a solo performance of an accepted “classic,” or something that stands alone. Now if that’s the case, you’re obviously going to have much more interesting riffs with women developing and ringing changes on ideas, than having science fiction written mostly by men, which kind of limits the possibilities for new riffs. And if you look at the field now, you see that you can’t get away with simply assuming certain things about, for example, the future of gender roles or that there are immutable unchangeable differences between men and women. Doesn’t mean you can’t write something that makes such assumptions, only that you’ve got to have a good reason for the assumption; you’ve got to make a case, or at least make it plausible. Same goes for having more science fiction by people of color, different nationalities, or members of the LGBT community; it’s bound to make the conversation much more interesting and much richer. HoF: What challenges remain for women in science fiction, both as authors and as characters? PS: The same ones that remain for all of us who write sf, and I’m not sure it makes much sense to talk only about science fiction here, as what we have now are a number of subgenres – high fantasy, urban fantasy, vampire stories, supernatural fiction, horror fiction, with science fiction still hanging around and keeping company with all of them. And a lot of what’s called science fiction is actually, in my opinion, a kind of science fantasy that uses the standard tropes but that isn’t all that plausible as realistic extrapolation. But whatever you write, you have to be aware of what that particular story or novel demands and then meet those demands. Different stories demand different things, and some will inherently have wider appeal than others, and all a writer can do is make whatever she writes the best kind of story or novel of its kind that she is capable of writing. *** You can visit Pamela Sargent and learn more about the novel Earthseed on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/EarthseedBook  

Location, location, location...

...it's everything. Think about it. The Cinderella story dates back to 850 AD (the first written version being the Chinese version, Yeh-Shen.) Move it from culture to culture and it changes accordingly. Only the core stays the same: A youngster bereft of a mother figure, an ineffectual father, a festival, an attraction to someone of higher social status,a lost item and the end success of finding it.

Culture, location--they are what change the details of the story. In Korea, Cinderella is Pear Blossom, named for the tree planted on the day she was born. In this one, stepmother sends her out to the rice paddies and tasks her with weeding the whole thing in an afternoon with nothing but wilted turnips to sustain her. Black Ox comes to the rescue, munching away at the weeds as fast as the wind ruffling through the rice. No prince, but a magistrate plucks her out of her sorry circumstances, their marriage making her a noblewoman.

In Ireland, Cinderella is a boy named Becan, and the glass slipper is an old boot. When the stepmother and sisters move in, they banish him to the fields, not the kitchen. There are no dresses and magical coaches, but a dragon to slay and a princess to rescue with the help of a magical bull. Before the princess can thank him, Becan runs off, leaving behind that old boot I mentioned. Can you guess how it ends?

The locations we choose as writers dictate the details of our stories. Whether we use the European-based, medieval setting we all know and love, or something more exotic, a reader is going to expect the culture to ring true. I thought about this because of Mark's post on taverns last week; taverns and pubs are as universal as Cinderella, but they vary by culture. They look different, sound different, smell different. The thing they have in common is alcohol...and, of course, the drunken songs. 

When I needed a "tavern" in Finder, I couldn't call it that. I couldn't make it look like the Prancing Pony. My world has a Middle Eastern, desert setting. I called it a doovah, borrowing very loosely from an old Arabic word. I gave it one open wall whether the others were cloth, hide, or stucco/stone. The characters didn't drink whiskey; they drank sambi (again, borrowing from an old Arabic word.) I did, however, let them drink beer and wine. They are as universal as Cinderella.

Creating worlds comes with all the god-like glory implied; it also comes with responsibility. If borrowing from Italy, keep the culture Italian. Use lots of terracotta and stone buildings and olive trees. Put a pagoda in your village square, or a stone circle in your cornfield, and you're not only leaping out of your setting, you're blending cultures in ways that will make savvy readers put your book in the freezer, and the less savvy ones wonder why the book suddenly doesn't seem as good as it did before.

Blending cultures, languages, even physical characteristics speaks of conquest, an efficient and successful method of transportation over vast distances, migration. I play with this sort of thing in A Time Never Lived, using this blending as a way of showing the clash of cultures. If you do have a cornfield in an Italian setting, or a pagoda in your village square, you'd better have a reason, and you'd better know that reason, because someone will call you on it.

Do we have to borrow to create fantasy worlds? In my opinion, yes, and in doing so, we have to be diligent about being consistent about it. Trying to create something that doesn't touch on a culture in our own world doesn't seem possible. I am open to being shown I'm wrong! I never pass up the opportunity to learn something new.